The Pursuit of Justice and Inheritance from Marcher Lordships to Parliament: the Implications of Margaret Malefaunt’s Abduction in Gower in 1438

Summary

The marcher lordship of Gower in south Wales rarely rated a mention in the proceedings of the medieval English parliament. However, it achieved notoriety when the Commons and the Lords met in the winter of 1439–40: they were treated to a harrowing story with Gower at its centre. A petition was submitted to the Commons, either in the parliament's first session at Westminster between 12 November and 21 December 1439, or more likely in the second session held at Reading between 14 January and the third week of February 1440, on behalf of a young widow, Margaret Malefaunt. Her husband, Sir Thomas Malefaunt, had died in London on 8 May 1438, and the petition described how, in the course of her journey to London some weeks later from the Malefaunt estates in Pembrokeshire, she was abducted in Gower, and then taken to the neighbouring lordship of Glamorgan where she was raped and forced into marriage by her husband's former servant, Lewys Leyshon. The purpose of the petition was to secure the arrest and punishment of Leyshon: it accordingly related Margaret's view of the incident and proposed certain legal procedures by which he could be brought to justice.

Sir Thomas and Margaret Malefaunt were lord and lady of the manors of Upton and Pill in the lordship of Pembroke and of the manors of Wenvoe and St. George in the Vale of Glamorgan. In 1438 they were, therefore, mesne tenants of both Humphrey, duke of Gloucester and earl of Pembroke, and Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick and lord of Glamorgan. The incident in Gower, whose lord was John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, casts light on several aspects of society and the law in fifteenth-century England and Wales: on relationships – including judicial relationships – between three marcher lordships and between them and the crown, on the availability of justice (including for women), on relations between marcher lords and their prominent tenants, and on the interconnections of the English and Welsh gentry and their links with the royal household.

Doubtless in the light of advice available to Margaret from her relatives, friends and attorneys, the first part of her petition recounts what happened in Gower and Glamorgan in June 1438.